John Peel: Sónar 2002

I should clarify that unlike later years, this isn’t John Peel atSónar, but instead it’s excerpts taken from his shows broadcast on Radio 1 on 18th June and 20th June 2002 (19th June not available).

In this podcast I’ve included two live sets Peel included in his shows. All the the performances you can find below. Why only these two ? Well because apart from the one from Cex, all the other live sets were at least 30 minutes long.

Sónar 2002 was particularly memorable because it took place at the same time as the 2002 World Cup (being played in South Korea/Japan). There were screens set up all around Barcelona so that everybody could watch. John Peel in his shows, captured in the podcast above mentioned the England v Brazil game – and below as you’ll see, more football watching.
Lastly there was another footie and music connection in that Sonar used a footballing icon (because of the World Cup maybe) as a promotional tool for the festival.
That icon was one Diego Armando Maradona.

Additionally:

When he was at Sonar in 2002, John recorded some video clips which were added to a special page on the Radio 1 website. These were done though before broadband was widespread and we were all dialling up on 56k. Another thing was that these clips were in Real Player video format. Real Player remember that ? Now how many of you have it still installed on your computer ? So the problem is that all of us here in the future can’t watch these clips from the past. But I’ve worked out a way of extracting all of the clips John (and Sheila) recorded and I’ve uploaed them to You Tube for archival purposes.
As mentioned it was dial up and Real Player so these clips are a very low and not very good quality:

View a list of all the videos here.
View some photographs here and here.

Sadly this is the only John Peel/Sonar appearances mentioned on the Radio 1 website. There’s nothing for his 2001, 2003 and 2004 shows…

But.

Our friend over at Life has Surface Noise has the audio from these broadcasts, which unlike the above, were live from Barcelona and not from Peel Acres a couple of days later:

This year is a significant one because it will be 10 years since we lost the great man, so for this sad anniversary we should make sure that like all the previous #keepingitpeel days it will be one that commemorates and celebrates the memory of John Peel.